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Failing Fast: The Educated Citizen in Crisis

Sixth Annual Fall Conference

Thursday, October 3, 2013 – Friday, October 4, 2013

“Failing Fast: The Educated Citizen in Crisis” asks how we can re-invigorate the cultural and educational institutions that have nurtured public-spiritedness that is the bedrock virtue of American constitutional democracy. In an increasingly global world, do we need a common public language? Is college education necessary for engaged citizenship? Should politically involved citizens have knowledge of the arts and practical skills like building and fixing things? What, in the 21st century, is an educated citizen?

At a time of blistering technological and cultural change, reformers want schools to prepare students for the future—but which future? And despite the polarizing polemics over curricular change and the learned arguments mounted by the most earnest reformers whatever their politics, we must admit that we have no idea where our increasingly virtual reality will take us next month, let alone in a decade. Which skills and knowledge will be needed? What brain enhancements will be available? Handwringing in the public square over whether children should still be taught cursive is much ado about nothing when, if futurists are correct, we soon may no longer need to learn how to die.

If we can no longer count on the ways of the past to guide us in a brave—or terrifying—new world, education must evolve with it. As such, thinking people must ask themselves how that evolution should be handled, considered, and undertaken.

In “The Crisis in Education," Hannah Arendt writes: "education can play no part in politics, because in politics we always have to deal with those who are already educated.” Arendt worried that when politicians talk about educating voters, they are really seeking unanimity. Political education sounds like indoctrination, which threatens the plurality of opinion at the core of intellectual life and the politics that protects it.

Against politics in its basest form, Arendt saw education as “the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it.” The educator must love the world and believe in it if he is to introduce young people to a world worthy of respect. In this sense, education is conservative—it conserves the world as it has been given. But education is also revolutionary, insofar as teachers must realize that the young people they nurture are newcomers whose fate is to change the world. Arendt argued that teachers must humbly teach what is; in this way they prepare students to transform what is into what might be.

Arendt shares Ralph Waldo Emerson's view that “He only who is able to stand alone is qualified for society.” Emerson’s imperative of self-reliance resonates with Arendt’s imperative to think for oneself. Education, Arendt insists, must risk allowing people their unique and even unpopular viewpoints, eschewing even well-intentioned conformism and seeking, instead, to nurture independent minds. Education prepares the youth for politics by bringing them into a common world as courageous, independent, and unique individuals.

In the early years of our republican experiment, the American yeoman farmer participated in Town Hall meetings. Today, few of us have the experience or the desire to govern. Are we suffering an institutional failure to make clear to graduates that participation in governance is a personal responsibility? Or is our withdrawal from politics the conscious result of modern individualism now liberated from the demands of politics by a virtual technological reality? Whatever the cause, elites imagine that the common people are no longer qualified for self-government; and the people increasingly distrust the educated elite that has consistently failed to deliver the dream of a well-managed technocratic welfare state.

In the most literate and technologically advanced society in all history, we have produced citizens who are politically sterile. If it’s true that we learn by doing, most Americans have little experience with politics. With the exception of serving on juries, few engage in civic service. Voting is the only public activity demanded of citizens in our democracy. It takes little effort; and still, few vote. The old ideal of the citizen democracy is in crisis.